This file provides information for replicating the results from: Jonathan Kastellec, Andrew Gelman and Jamie Chandler. 2008. "The Playing Field Shifts: Predicting the Seats-Votes Curve in the 2008
U.S. House Election. PS: Political Science &
Politics. 41(4):729-32.

DATA

We used three datasets in the paper: a district-level dataset containing
information on every election in each House election from 1946 to 2004;
an aggregate-level dataset containing information on the total number of
votes and seats gained by each party in the same elections; and a
dataset containing information on each district that we used to make
predictions for the 2006 election.

a)   Individual House Races Data, 1946-2006_

The dataset "House_1946_2006_jacobson.dta", which was given to us by Gary
Jacobson, contains various information onevery House race from 1946-2004, such
as the vote share of theDemocratic candidate and incumbency status; complete
coding information is available in "Jacobson_coding.DOC". We modified and
recoded this data using the Stata do-file "update 1946-2006 data.do". Coding
information for the updated dataset "House_1946_2006_updated.dta", which we
use for the analysis that appears in the paper, is available in
"1946-2004_coding_updated.DOC".

b)   Individual House Race Data for Predicting 2006 and 2008_

The dataset "2006_house_data.dta", which we used for our paper predicting the
2006 seats-votes curve, contains information about the 2006 election,
including incumbency status lagged vote leading up to the election, along with
information about the winner and vote margins in the 2006 election. Coding
information is available in "2006_coding.DOC" (this coding also applies to the
2008 datasets).

For the analyses used in the paper predicting the 2008 seats-votes curve, we
used information available as of July 2008. That database is available in
"2008_house_updated_pre_election.dta". After the election, we updated the
dataset to include vote totals and information on uncontested races. That
dataset is available in "2008_house_updated_post_election.dta".  Note that the
vote totals we used are unofficial results, as reported by CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/main.results/#H.

STATISTICAL CODE

All statistical analysis that appears in the paper was conducted using
R. Code for the pre-election analysis is available in
"2008_script_pre_election_replication.R". Code
for the post-election analysis is available in
"2008_script_post_election_replication.R".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

